Movie Nation

The acting is bad, the screenplay is worse in “The Wraith Within,” a low-budget thriller about “cursed” stuffed bear and the white-haired demon who goes around stabbing random Texans in revenge for a horrible crime long ago.

Five friends (Shane Christopher, Zara Majidpour, Allison Hawkstone, Brian Hodges, Gabriel Aronson) return to sleepy Junction, Texas for a reunion.

They don’t look all that happy to be there, amongst the “inbreeds” who stayed behind. Yeah, that’s how the Austin crowd refers to their classmates.

Testy, foul-mouthed encounters with shopkeepers, the sheriff (earringed, pasty-faced and long-haired Michael Madsen) and assorted others at the actual reunion should make our quintet out-of-towners wonder if it’s all worth it.

And that’s before this haunted teddy bear turns up, stuff starts flying off shelves, knives almost impale people, and then “almost” turns into a body count.

No sense bragging about how you’re going to “Jamie Lee Curtis this mother-f—-r.” The only deep insights the sheriff has are “That is a sh—y-ass way to go,” and a smirking “Not havin’ a great day.”

Let’s consult the local Native American (Jonathan Joss).

“Peckerwood, I know you’re not that stupid.”

The dialogue is bad, the line-readings of it are worse. A couple of the cast aren’t native English speakers and the strain of trying to make bad lines sound natural proves an over-reach for them. Not that the gringos are any better.

The deaths are not all that interesting, but the makeup “effect” is modestly chilling.

All things considered, this is just plain bad, even by horror C-movie standards.

It was directed by Aaron Strey and scripted by Carlos A. Samudio, lest you think I’m blaming the actors alone. Well done, all around.

And before you ask, no, it’s not even “bad movie drinking game” bad.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Shane Christopher, Zara Majidpour, Allison Hawkstone, Brian Hodges, Gabriel Aronson, Trey Davis, Jonathan Joss and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Strey, scripted by Carlos A. Samudio. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:17

A full generation has passed since the empowering and adorable “Bend it Like Beckham.” A lot has changed about the Desi diaspora in the UK, and in cinema about their lives.

The proof is in a mouthy, punchy and gonzo action comedy about an arranged marriage in something quite unlike “Polite Society.”

Writer-director Nida Manzoor’s debut feature is outlandish, over-the-top and furiously funny. She’s the creator of that loopy female Muslim punk band TV comedy “We Are Lady Parts,” and she doesn’t break punk stride in this “You girls these days” look at the state of young womanhood in the fading patriarchy of this corner of Britannia.

Ria, played by Priya Kansara in a break-out performance, is a skinny teen with stuntwoman dreams. She writes letters to her favorite stuntwoman, that badass Eunice Huthart. She makes delusional, slightly inept videos for her Stuntgirl Ria channel and dreams of getting Huthart to let her intern with her.

Her school advisor dismisses that notion. Her indulgent parents are waiting to shut this “silliness” down. And the towering all-girls school bully (Shona Babayemi) kicks her arse when she demands a demonstration.

Only older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) encourages her. But Lena’s freshly-dropped out of art school and a bit lost herself. Then the handsome, rich young doctor Salim (Ashay Khanna) gives her Lena the eye, and his family and their family take an interest in setting them up.

Yes, another generation has passed and they’re a long way from the Subcontinent, but “arranged marriages” are still a thing. Only Dad (Jeff Mirz) doesn’t like the semantics of that “brand.”

“You should see it like ‘Lena has outsourced the search for a suitable match to us so that WE can carry out the necessary due dilligence,” keeping her from wasting “unnecessary emotional capital” on flirting and dating and all that.

Sure, it’s the match.com era and business is business. But it’s nice to see romance still blooms among the Indo-Muslims of the UK.

Ria flips the f-out. And that’s pretty much how this foul-mouthed teen, not shy about talking back to Mum (Shobu Kapur) and Dad, puts it. She won’t allow her sister to give up her art dream for “some smarmy wanker.”

She accuses Lena of “doing a Jane Austen.” And with her schoolmates (Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri), she lays out a plan to tear this wedding asunder.

The teens reference classic romance and action film conventions — obstacles to love, plot devices that might prevent the nuptials. They don disguises to get into a men’s locker room at Salim’s gym and plot even bigger capers as the picture takes a seriously loopy turn past melodrama and into full on diabolical conspiracy, real or imagined.

“Oy! There’s a reason tropes are tropes! Because they work!”

“Polite Society” sprints through its first scenes, struggles a bit when things go over-the-top and finds the fun again for a blitzkrieg of a finale. Yes, there’s a big fat Indian wedding, and a big dance. But there are also epic throwdowns — fights with martial arts movie wirework — big time villainy and a “Thelma & Louise” rag-top T-bird becomes a getaway car.

The larger theme here is hanging on to your dreams, a bit tired and tiresome in this affluent spoiled-kids setting.

But that’s “You girls, these days” in a nutshell, no longer under a familial or cultural thumb and not limiting their dreams to “doctor” or “Stepford Wife” or even simply bending it like Beckham. Try to stop them and you might get an “I am FURY” if you’re lucky. Next thing you know, some Van Damme “helicopter kick” might come right at your noggin.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Ashkay Khanna, Nimra Bucha, Shobu Kapoor, Shona Babayemi, Ella Bruccoleri, Jeff Mirz and Seraphina Beh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nida Manzoor. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:44

Let’s not get all choked up, ok? Keep it together. Be professional.

I mean, come on. It’s Chris Pratt.

The first trailer to this November laugher from Searchlight is LOL cute. A teensy bit of Ted you know who vibe.

A feel good sports movie for the fall? Let us pray.

A piece of Portuguese history, lore that’s little known outside of the land of Port and corks.

A fantastical Marco Polo figure who visited Africa, India, China and Japan in the mid 16th century, a chap few believed when he came home (he plainly made some things up) is the subject of this hit or miss period piece/adventure.

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The bad pun in the title isn’t the worst sin of “Organ Trail,” basically a dawdling B Western rendered violent enough to be labeled “horror.”

It’s “horror” only in the broadest sense, but how you bill and sell your movie isn’t usually a deal breaker. Much of the slaughter here is pretty generic, but there are some moments of well-staged flash, fire and fury.

It only seems like the folks involved wasted stunning Livingston, Montana-in-winter scenery in restrospect. This great location in search of a better Western is saddled with one gorgeous backdrop after another.

But from its 25 minute prologue to the drawn-out “Is he/she dead? Did he/she finally die? For real this time?” ending, this lumbering beast never comes to life. The screenplay is like a never-oiled machine, a jalopy that groans, squeaks, rattles and stalls all over lovely Montana, wrapped in freshly-scrubbed and shaved players. period-proper costumes, anachronistic F-bombs and boredom.

The prologue follows a farm family down off a mountain, two parents and two teens and many of their possessions stuffed into a Conestoga wagon pulled by a lone horse (sure) through a blizzard. In the valley below, they stumble across a massacre site, and rescue the lone survivor (Olivia Grace Applegate) who was crucified by arrows.

And then the non-Natives who carried out that slaughter jump them, and only the daughter Abigail (Zoé De Grand Maison) and crucified Cassidy survive that, taken hostage and dragged off to an abandoned church in a new ghost town.

Turns out, this English goon (Sam Trammell) and his four henchmen were the ones who did the massacring in both cases. Now they have other plans for the two women, who will go through some things as Abby fights back and does her damnedest to escape and the resigned-to-her-fate Cass starts to come to grips with all the people who die when either one of them reach out for help.

The collateral damage in this corner of Big Sky Country is horrific.

But the priorities on this production are laughable, the script is rife with chaff — scenes, sequences and characters who do not advance the plot and delay getting to “the real action” to a pointless degree.

A Black farmer (Clé Bennett) leaves his pregnant wife (Jessica Francis Duke) to get mixed-up in this affair. Thomas Lennon plays a barkeep at a candlelit saloon (another gorgeous image), a character whose dramatic purpose is less impressive than his name — Royal Fitzgibbon

Sadism is the default emotion, “surviving the unsurvivable” the rule of thumb and nonsense and more nonsense pads the running time.

The Englishman hears someone called “Romeo” and wonders “Do you read Shakespeare?” of an illerate murderous minion. He feels the need to to extemporize when he’s sharing a bottle.

“Chateau Lafitte, ’64, dominant grape, Cabernet Sauvignon. Sturdy vintage to be sure, characterized by notes of smoke, incense, tar and saddle leather!”

If the screenwriter (Meg Turner) wrote that, “Learn to kill your darlings, dear.” And maybe Google when the F-bomb showed up in the American vernacular. Here’s a tip, “Deadwood” got it wrong. If she didn’t write it, there’s another prime candidate for the cutting room floor.

With these locations and this cast and the action beats that work, this might have been a solid 80-minute B-movie that looks like an A-picture. Director of Photography Joe Kessler’s the only one who should put any of this on his sizzle reel.

“Organ Trail” went wrong with that bloated prologue, wrong when no one thinned the superfluous out of the script and really wrong with that stupid title.

Rating: R for strong violence, (profanity) and some sexual references

Cast: Zoé De Grand Maison, Sam Trammell, Olivia Grace Applegate, Clé Bennett, Nicholas Logan and Thomas Lennon

Credits: Directed by Michael Patrick Jann, scripted by Meg Turner. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:52

Seems like a waste of the best Washington the movies have ever seen.

But the money’s got to be good, keeps him relevant I guess.

He’s not getting any younger. Surely there are better parts for an Oscar winning icon to play. And if not, shame on Hollywood.

This Berlin Film Fest darling (2022) earns a limited release May 5.

It looks…captivating.

Here’s a nasty, darkly-funny thriller that gives new meaning to the phrase “Turkish Delight.”

“Chokehold,” titled “Boga Boga” in Turkish, is a “Will he get away with it?” murder mystery about a Ponzi scheme operator that everybody in Asia Minor seems to want dead. We have just enough time to consider our anti-hero’s guilt or innocence in that financial fraud case when locals start taking their opportunitistic shot at killing him.

But it’s pretty obvious pretty quickly that perhaps “they” should have thought this through. As guilt-ridden as Yalin (Kivanç Tatlitug) is, as soft as this city boy/son of wealth appears, you shouldn’t be shocked that just because you taunt him and threaten him or simply get the drop on him that he’s not going to fight back.

Yalin has returned to his father’s luxurious country house with wife Beyza (Funda Eryigit) to lay low after getting out of jail via some shady deal. He and his partners cost their fellow Turks hundreds of millions, and now he’s returned to his hometown, a place the ancient Greeks knew as “Assos” (near modern day Behram). He shouldn’t expect a warm welcome.

Beyza has a friend or two here, but every store and business Yalin enters lets him know he’s not wanted there. And then one hectoring, threatening shopkeeper takes things further. He grabs a rope and tries to choke Yalin to death.

We’re almost as surprised as he is that Yalin manages to fight his way free, and when his attacker proves unwilling to lay off, Yalin kills him. Considering everything that’s already hanging over Yalin, he can’t just drive off and pretend this didn’t happen, even though he starts to. He thinks about it just enough to return, grab the body and dispose of it.

It won’t be the last time.

Actor-turned director Onur Saylak sticks mostly with our not-exactly-poker-faced protagonist, and his star, the script and the direction conspire to make us sympathize with this guilt-ridden criminal who goes full tilt paranoid pretty quickly after this first attack. A scary “chat” with a local cop (Gürgen Öz) lets him know he has no friends here, that somebody’s going to get him and no one will care, and that he was seen at the shop where that now-missing choker who choked worked.

Literally everybody is out to get him. Well, maybe not his make the best of things, “At least we’re not dead” (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed into English) wife. But her lunches with a friend suggest she’s judging him, too. She has no idea what new sins he’s been adding to his tally.

We’re treated to a bit of the town’s ancient history, when Eubulus ruled and Aristotle came to teach. Our lecturer, being Turkish, declines to use the word “Greek” to describe the region’s most eminent personages. We glimpse the human trafficking — smuggling refugees to the Greek island of Lesbos — and can smell the corruption.

And we immerse ourselves in the crimes and the all important cover-up for those crimes.

Not all of “Chokehold” makes sense or seems logical. But as the threats rise and the deeds are done, Tatlitug and Saylay and screenwriter Hakan Gunday keep us engrossed and invested in this bad-man-turning-worse and his fate.

Their grip might not be as tight as Yalin’s, but the hold never loosens up as the suspense builds to cleverly cryptic finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, smoking, profanity

Cast: Kivanç Tatlitug, Funda Eryigit and Gürgen Öz 

Credits: Directed by Onur Saylak, scripted by Hakan Gunday. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” comes to the screen as a laugh-out-loud comedy that will be nostalgic to those who grew up with the books, and a rare girl-powered tween tale with edge for everybody else.

The laughs can be cringe-worthy, but when the focus of a book is “the magic of being a girl,” the messy side of entering puberty and questioning religion, that’s kind of a given. I mean, when you get the writer/director of “Edge of Seventeen” to adapt it, what’d you expect?

And besides, it’ll be mostly the boys and the book-banners who’ll be doing the cringeing.

Abby Ryder Fortson of “Ant-Man and the Wasp” makes the title character appropriately wide-eyed and naive, an indulged eleven year-old only-child who moves to a new school in the Jersey suburbs at the age girls are forming into “packs” and boys are popping up on their radar.

The family hasn’t even unpacked when pushy biggest-house-in-the-neighborhood Nancy (Elle Graham, terrific) shows up and selects Margaret for inclusion in her “secret girls club.”

Margaret, Nancy, Janie (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) may be gossipy and childishly callous. And we could see Nancy morphing into a genuine Mean Girl. But it’s pre-social media 1970. They’re just an innocent quartet determined to be get on with growing up.

Their peer-pressuring club “rules” include keeping a “boy book” of their crushes, and an oath to share when each gets her first period “and tell us all about it.” “No socks” are one of Nancy’s fashio “rules.” And having a bra is a sixth grade “must,” whether you need it or not. Nancy has just the exercise for that.

“I must I must I must increase my bust my bust my bust!”

Mom (Rachel McAdams, excellent as always ), who gave up her career for this move, has to take Margaret through that amusing rite of passage, buying that “trainer” bra, an experience that wouldn’t be complete without a tactless sales lady. But Mom is there for the initiation and for support.

“How’s that feel?”

“I cannot WAIT to take it off!”

“Welcome to womanhood.”

Margaret grew up in a religiously “mixed” marriage. Ohio Protestant Mom is an artist and art teacher, estranged from her family because she married a Jewish New Yorker (Benny Safdie). So, “no religion” is the rule in their house. It’s a matter for Margaret to make up her own mind about “when you’re older.”

Her overbearing, widowed, well-off Jewish granny (amusingly larger-than-life Kathy Bates) is the only grandparent in her life, and she isn’t exactly neutral on that subject.

Margaret has taken to conversational prayers to an unseen deity who might save her from having to move (no dice), embarassment (ditto), and help her fit in.

“Are you there, God?”

That subject moves to the foreground when Margaret’s first-year teacher (Echo Kellum) decides that would be her perfect sixth grade “project,” a subject she’ll study all year and make a report on at year’s end. Granny can take her to synagogue in “the city,” her parents can make a Christmas Eve visit to a local church, club pal Janie can take her to a predictably energetic and musical Black church and the Catholic church she’ll stumble into.

Everything addressed here, from religion and puberty to girl-bullying, that first “real” boy-girl party and that first crush operates on a higher, funnier plane than your average “Wimpy Kid” and its ilk.

“Margaret” can seem a tad adult for younger kids. And as nostalgia, wallowing in ’70s fashions and often ugly “mid-century modern” decor, all aimed at luring the first generations of fans of the Blume books, the film falls short. Fortson makes a solid lead. But Oscar winner Bates and McAdams are the only “big names” and players with real pop in the cast, with Safdie — co-writer/director of “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” — having so little screen presence that one question that pops to mind every time we see him paired with McAdams.

How’d he end up with her?

But people have been talking about adapting “Are You There God?” for the big screen for decades, and the arrival of this picture, shortcomings and all, could not be timelier. With red state libraries under assault and reactionary book-bannings by the least literate “parents” and school boards and every day’s headlines featuring some new ultra-conservative assault on women’s rights and girls’ rights to their girlhood, “Margaret” has a timeliness that Blume could barely have imagined when her break-out book was published back in 1970.

Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s film is funny, cutting and true to its source material, an amusingly unblinkered look at girlhood that may be a bit budgetarily-malnourished but could not show up on screens at a better time. The shock of “Why have there not been more realistic girl-centered stories like this before now?” just underscores that.

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material involving sexual education and some suggestive material

Cast: Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, Amari Alexis Price, Elle Graham, Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Kathy Bates

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, based on the novel by Judy Blume. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:45